Five Georgias: Suburban Atlanta

In this fourth installment of a series explaining the regions that make up Georgia’s statewide geographic political factions, we’re going to explore the newfound statewide power broker. That would be the roughly four million people that live in Suburban Atlanta.

Georgia is a state of roughly ten million people, so any area that claims forty percent of the votes needed to form a simple majority would seem to have a dominant position. This, of course, would assume that the region acted as one, and/or had leaders and constituents with well-honed political skills to exert the influence proportional to their votes.

Like many adolescent boys just given car keys for the first time, Suburban Atlanta seems to understand that it has an amazing amount of power some new found freedom, but little understanding what it takes consistently find the right partner for success.

Until Governor Perdue’s election and the subsequent assumption of power by Republicans, suburban Atlantans had little to no power under the Gold Dome. Democrats ruled this state, using a coalition of urban Democrats and rural Democrats. Republicans believed that those folks took all their money to overspend on schools in Atlanta and “roads to nowhere” in South Georgia.

Folks in the suburbs know that Atlanta Public Schools spend more tax dollars to educate kids than any other system in the state, when they want their tax dollars going to their most cost efficient schools that produce better results. They see a bunch of four lane highways in rural Georgia with little traffic, but sit idling in gridlock. They’re less aware that Atlanta Schools receive the lowest dollars per student from the state, or that transportation money is balanced by population using equal funding per congressional district.

These and other suburban legends get in the way of exerting policies at the state legislature that would otherwise allow the region around Atlanta’s core to act in its own self-interest. To do so, however, would require more self-awareness.

Several years ago, I was speaking to a civic group in the Atlanta suburbs. After I was done talking about possible solutions to the region’s transportation problems, the first question I got was “When are the people in Atlanta going to let us solve these problems for ourselves?”

I wasn’t sure who he meant, as I interpreted “people in Atlanta” as “the state legislature”. I was quickly redirected. He, living less than ten miles from downtown, believed the City of Atlanta’s residents outnumbered folks in the suburbs. The folks he (and quite a few others in the room) thought were controlling things numbered about 450,000 people. Take all of what broadly can be defined the Urban Core and you may get 1.5 million.

Suburbanites outnumber them 3 to 1. But they have yet to find common ground with folks just like them that live one or three counties away.

Folks in Cobb County rarely want to work with like-minded folks in Gwinnett County on regional solutions. In fact, they see “regionalism” as a socialist inspired enemy. Cherokee County and Fayette County could be the same county if they weren’t separated by an hour’s drive.

Despite miles and miles of homogenous strip malls and McMansions, many folks in suburbia believe their corner of the world is unique, and everything outside their neighborhood is “Atlanta”. And in suburbia, “Atlanta” is not who most folks want to work with.

The problem is compounded when you realize that there is no local clearing house in Suburban Atlanta for information. In rural Georgia, if you talk to the local sheriff, the pastor at the First Baptist Church, the head of the Rotary or Kiwanis Club, and the High School principal (or head football coach), you’ve likely got a full pulse of the community. In the Atlanta suburbs, if you do that, you’ve talked to four people.

Many of these folks aren’t from here. Many have transferred in. Many will transfer out in a few years. Their time horizons are short, and they don’t tend to want to invest in plans that will come to fruition in ten to twenty-years.

They get their news from cable or the internet if they get political news at all. Their information diet, left or right, is based on DC partisan games that they then extrapolate to state and local politics. They are not focused on mundane local problems, nor local solutions.

The result is you have 4 million Georgians – many of whom share common backgrounds, education levels, goals, and income strata – who have no idea how to connect with each other, have no interest in working together, and believe they are better off insulated from their neighbors than finding shared goals.

The person who can figure out how to unite this region as one could control state politics forever. The folks in the rest of Georgia likely don’t have to worry about this.

Suburban Atlantans like things the way they are. They just wish someone else would let them fix a few things. Until this region can learn how to unite to wield the power their numbers suggest, their role in setting state policy will continue to underperform the potential of their strength in numbers.

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About Author

Charlie

Publisher of GeorgiaPol.com
UGA & GSU degrees in Economics
Executive Director for PolicyBEST
Interests are public policy solutions in Education, Science & Medicine, and Transportation that keep GA competitive and a great place to live.

8 Comments

Jack Fitz

*slow clap*

I don’t think you could’ve critiqued this segment any better. Well said, Charlie.

Cobb and Gwinnett are separated by north Fulton, which is big enough to be it’s own county (and indeed is nearly as large as several counties in this map i.e. Pike, Barrow, Fayette, Clayton, Spalding). That makes any notion of suburban regional cooperation impossible. Yes, there is Forsyth and Cherokee. But honestly, as recently as 10-15 years go, they were considered more akin to Hall County – not on this map BTW – as exurbs at best. Even now with sprawl having fully incorporated them into “Atlanta”, a “regionalism” plan that “includes” them would honestly be more aimed at projects in the southernmost areas of those counties to facilitate the Cobb-to-Gwinnett pipeline projects that are what people actually want. (Well, people who don’t actually live, work and pay taxes in Cherokee and Forsyth that is.) But – surprise! – being a conduit between Cobb and Gwinnett that only exists to circumvent north Fulton isn’t the best use of taxpayer dollars and administrative efforts of Cherokee and Forsyth.

The same is true of the “southern suburbs” – which I guess means south of Gwinnett and Cobb – to a degree. Not so long ago they weren’t that densely populated, and now undertaking “regional” projects that are actually more about making things better for folks in the big 4 – Cobb, Gwinnett, Fulton and DeKalb – than for people who live and work in their own counties isn’t in their interests, and it would be impossible to build a political case otherwise amongst either the longtime locals or the new residents who moved out there seeking cheaper real estate.

This means that the state is going to have to take the lead. The first approach – Perdue’s TSPLOST – failed politically because it forced together both urban projects and suburban projects. Nathan Deal’s “approach” was to address a few problematic interstate exchanges and punt the rest. The state needs to come up with a plan where the suburban counties contribute funds for projects that some other agency manages with an eye towards local, regional and statewide benefit.

To get it done, I guess we could rename MARTA to UARTA (Urban Atlanta RTA) because – to be honest – that is all local and state politics will allow the it to ever be. Then create SATA (Suburban Atlanta Transportation Authority) to service the rest. That would finally end the political football. Suburban politicians would no longer be able to use the threat of MARTA to justify not doing anything. And the longtime dream of urbanists to use MARTA to usurp local authority on economic and educational planning decisions would end. In its place we could get out of it a suburban light rail/BRT system that would seamlessly integrate with MARTA, a bunch of new badly needed highways, and (hopefully) a united front for state and federal support for extending MARTA into north Fulton (this would kill off the main motive for the Milton County brigade too) plus Emory/CDC, Lithonia, Clayton State and other places that rail – again hopefully light rail/BRT – needs to go in DeKalb and Clayton.

I believe that cities are one way to achieve cooperation. For example, what do Smyrna and Sandy Springs have in common (besides a state Senate district)? We flank 285. We share the same concerns about connectivity, transit, and economic development. If the electeds don’t get it, it’s likely staff does, and generally, Atlanta’s suburban cities have top-notch key administrative staffers.

And, oh, hey, incidentally, those communities are both represented (in whole or in part) by one state Senator. Maybe whoever the next person is to represent that district can help foster the necessary cooperation.

I don’t think we’re going to see any new metro highways, badly needed or not. There haven’t been any major new highways completed in the extended/greater Atlanta core since GA400 and Reagan Parkway in the mid-1990’s.

Everybody wants new highways, just NIMBY. The Outer Perimeter, along with the flag and teachers, was important in the election of Sonny Perdue.

Suburb to suburb transit won’t be a smash because of insufficient density of development on both ends of the trip, particularly the non-home end. Transfers may be seamless with respect to fares, but they’re a ridership killer. A rule of thumb (except in the case of excruciating long trips, distance or time wise, where ridership is small anyway) is that a mode change, car to rail (as in driving to a station), BRT or light rail to heavy rail, etc is one-quarter loss of ridership.

Gwinnett County therefore ought to decide if transit travel to the Atlanta core or to Cobb County suits Gwinnett is best. If the former (which I think) is best, extend the MARTA yellow (NE) heavy rail, and advocate for light rail/BRT between the yellow line and Cobb. If the latter, build light rail/BRT, and require transfer to the yellow line to travel to the Atlanta core.

Touching on Charlie’s point, elected officials in the suburbs have for years exploited these “suburban myths” for one purpose…maintain their power. Once you have honest elected officials in place that have the best interests of their people in mind and not just using the easiest means to be reelected…then things will change. Its happening slowly, but it is happening. Clayton has MARTA now and I dont think you will find many people who think that was a bad decision, or think it hurt the county in any way.

The law requiring transportation spending balancing by Congressional District was eviscerated by multiple exemptions or exceptions a while back (perhaps in response to the funding shortfall). For instance, I think interstate spending or major elements of interstate spending were exempt from the balancing requirement. The exemptions and changes may have since been rolled back however.